Configure preferred geo data location in Office 365

 

GDPR had me thinking about Multi-Geo in Office 365

By default, Office 365 resources for your users are located in the same geo as your Azure AD tenant. So, if your tenant is located in North America, then the users’ Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive is also located in North America. For a multinational organization, this might not be optimal for various reasons.

Reasons such as

• Performance and
• Data residency requirements for data-at-rest

Multi-Geo enables a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple Office 365 data-center geographies (geos) and gives customers the ability to store their Exchange and OneDrive data, at-rest, on a per-user basis, in their chosen geos

By setting the attribute preferredDataLocation, you can define a user’s geo

A list of all geos for Office 365 can be found here or long URL format: https://products.office.com/en-us/where-is-your-data-located?geo=All

These values can be set in your Office 365 tenant via PowerShell or Azure AD Connect.

In PowerShell – 

# Connect to Office 365 – by Jermal Smith (@jermsmit)
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
# Get-Credential – You will be asked for username / password
$credential = Get-Credential
# Import-Module MsOnline
Import-Module MsOnline
# If this step fails in error – Install-Module MsOnline
# Connect to MsolService using supplied credentials
Connect-MsolService -Credential $credential

Then use the command: Set-MsolCompanyAllowedDataLocation followed by service type and location.

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/msonline/set-msolcompanyalloweddatalocation?view=azureadps-1.0

After you have assigned Data Locations you can then set users to the location by issue the following example command:

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName jsmith@jermsmit.com -PreferredDataLocation EUR

Then confirming with:

Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName jsmith@jermsmit.com | Select PreferredDataLocation

The above works well for new users, but for existing user’s you will need to trigger a migration with the following command:

Start-SPOUserAndContentMove -UserPrincipalName jsmith@jermsmit.com -DestinationDataLocation EUR

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/start-spouserandcontentmove?view=sharepoint-ps

Lastly… “To be eligible for Multi-Geo, you must have at least 5,000 seats in your Office 365 subscription” As this is just getting released I am confident more information will be known soon.